LibertyRecompAndroid

An Android port of Liberty Recompiled, the static recompilation of the Xbox 360 version of Grand Theft Auto IV. It runs the recompiled game natively on arm64 Android phones and handhelds with a Snapdragon (Adreno) GPU, using Vulkan through a bundled Mesa Turnip driver. There is no emulator in between.

DISCLAIMER!

This is pure 100% AI slop. I didn't made this by hand at all, it's all thanks to Claude and I, vaduur, take ZERO credit or responsibility of this port being unstable. It will run shitty, that's a guarantee. All I did is spent couple of sleepless night testing and pointing out the issues. Oh, yeah, and spent some pocket change on Claude sub ofc. Please be aware of it and feel free to fork this repo or use it as a reference in your future ReXGlue to Android ports. Thank you and have a nice day.

BTW, Any feedback is very appreciated, Issues are open, submit a ticket if you have any.

Caution

This is an experimental, unofficial port of a project that is itself in early development. Expect crashes and rough edges. It has been developed and tested on one device, a Retroid Pocket 5 (Snapdragon 865 / Adreno 650).

Note

New features land in pre-releases first, while they are being tested. The release marked Latest is the stable one. Pre-releases are listed above it and marked Pre-release. Feedback on them is welcome in Issues.

This project does not include any game assets. You need your own legally obtained copy of the Xbox 360 game and its title update. Nothing here helps you get them.

Status

On the Retroid Pocket 5 with the default settings:

• The game installs, boots and plays: the intro, the early story missions, free roam and driving have been played. Saves persist across launches.
• The game renders at the console's native 720p with FXAA. The display scales the image to the panel.
• Frame rate is capped at 30 FPS with VSync. Most places hold a steady 30. The heaviest far views (bridges, the skyline at night) drop to about 25–29 FPS.
• Shadows, draw distance and the shadow map size match the console. Traffic and pedestrian density are reduced to 40% of the PC defaults to save CPU time.
• Audio works, including the radio, cutscenes and Bink videos.

Known problems:

• Occasional crashes to the home screen still happen. Save often.
• The in-game installer's Select File / Select Folder buttons do not work on Android. Install from the launcher (0.5.7+) or through the app's install folder instead (see INSTALL.md).
• One deferred light-volume shader is skipped, because it hangs the GPU under Turnip. A few light volumes are missing as a result.
• The episodes (The Lost and Damned, The Ballad of Gay Tony) and online multiplayer have not been tested on Android.
• The on-screen gamepad is new (0.5.7.2) and has only been tried on the Retroid Pocket 5 so far (see Controls).

Device requirements

	Requirement
GPU	Qualcomm Adreno 6xx or 7xx (Snapdragon). Developed and tested on the Adreno 650. Adreno 8xx: experimental since 0.5.7.5, see below.
SoC	Snapdragon 865 class or faster recommended (SD 865/870/888, 8 Gen 1/2/3, 8s Gen 3, …).
CPU	arm64 with ARMv8.2-A (the build uses LSE atomics). ARMv8.0 chips such as the Snapdragon 835 crash on start.
Android	Android 10 (API 29) or newer, 64-bit.
RAM	8 GB recommended. 6 GB is untested.
Storage	About 7 GB for the installed game, plus room for the disc image while installing (about 15 GB free in total).
Controller	An XInput (Xbox-layout) gamepad is strongly recommended, see Controls.

Not supported:

• ARM Mali / Immortalis GPUs. This covers most Exynos chips before the 2200, MediaTek Dimensity/Helio and Google Tensor.
• Samsung Xclipse GPUs (Exynos 2200 and newer).
• PowerVR GPUs and anything else that is not an Adreno.

Why only Adreno: the renderer needs Vulkan 1.2 and was tuned on Turnip. Turnip is Mesa's open-source Vulkan driver, and it exists only for Adreno GPUs. The stock Qualcomm driver on older devices (including the Adreno 650) exposes only Vulkan 1.1. On other GPUs the bundled driver cannot load, and nobody has run the renderer on their vendor drivers.

Adreno 8xx (Snapdragon 8 Elite and newer): experimental, since 0.5.7.5. The game has been started on an Adreno 840 (Samsung, Android 17). The bundled Turnip build does not support Adreno 8xx, so import a Turnip build for it on the launcher (Import driver (.zip)), such as the Gen8 Turnip builds made for emulators. This is how it was tested. Expect rough edges, and please report how it runs in Issues. Low-end Adreno 6xx parts (610/618/619) should start, but expect them to be far too slow.

Since 0.5.6.2, when the bundled Turnip cannot drive the GPU, the app falls back to the device's own Vulkan driver if that driver offers Vulkan 1.2. This is untested on any GPU. If no usable driver exists, the app shows a dialog with the reason instead of closing silently, and it writes Android/data/com.libertyrecomp/files/last_launch.txt with the device, GPU and driver details. Attach that file when you report a problem.

Controls

An XInput (Xbox-layout) gamepad is strongly recommended. For example:

• an Xbox controller over Bluetooth or USB;
• any XInput-compatible pad;
• the built-in controls of a gaming handheld (Retroid, AYN Odin, AYANEO and similar) in Xbox mode.

The game is the Xbox 360 version, so its controls and button prompts follow the Xbox layout one to one. Other controllers that Android recognizes (DualShock, DualSense, Switch Pro and so on) usually work through SDL. Their buttons are mapped by position, though, and they have seen much less testing.

On-screen gamepad (0.5.7.2 and newer). Without a controller, the game shows a translucent Xbox 360 controller on the screen. It disappears as soon as a gamepad is connected, and comes back when it is disconnected.

• Left stick: touch anywhere on the left half of the screen (outside the buttons). The stick centres where your thumb lands.
• Right stick (camera): touch anywhere on the right half of the screen. It works like a controller's right stick.
• Buttons: A/B/X/Y lower right, D-pad next to the left stick, LT/LB above the left stick, RT/RB on the right, L3/R3 next to the bumpers, Back/Start at the top. Several fingers work at once.
• Menus are driven with the same buttons, as on a controller.

Settings in args.txt (see ADVANCED.md):

• --touch_controls=auto|on|off. auto shows the overlay whenever no gamepad is connected, on always shows it, off never does.
• --gta4_touch_layout=context brings back upstream's context-sensitive touch layout instead of the gamepad.

Game files required

• The Xbox 360 GTA IV disc as an .iso image. Only the USA (NTSC-U) release has been verified.
• Title Update 8 for that release (version 0.0.8.5), either as the STFS package or as a raw default.xexp. The PAL title update (0.0.8.6) is rejected.

The port was developed and tested with these exact files:

File	Size	MD5	SHA-1
Grand Theft Auto IV (USA) (En,Fr,De,Es,It).iso (full disc image)	7,835,492,352 bytes	f0a046aed1520a913b2125f0a69ee7d0	caa48dfb3b1b2fe3131e61fc66e35a22c6d0ba13
TU_1A581VI_000000K000000.0000000000205 (Title Update 8, STFS package)	3,715,072 bytes	f041b5f6721d7ee578560bac21668826	88d1c438814298b6da987b3ad5edc7e48a769ac9

If your files match, they are known to work. Other dumps of the same USA disc (for example trimmed or extracted images) may work too, but they have not been tested. Check your files with certutil -hashfile <file> MD5 on Windows, or md5sum <file> on Linux and macOS.

See the upstream dumping guide for how to get these files from your own console and disc.

Quick start

1. Install LibertyRecompAndroid-*.apk from the Releases page and open it. The app opens on a launcher with the game status, the installer, the Vulkan driver choice and Play (see INSTALL.md).

2. In the Game panel (0.5.7 and newer), choose your disc image (*.iso) and the Title Update 8 file wherever they are on the device. The app asks once for All files access. On older versions, or without that permission, copy both into Android/data/com.libertyrecomp/files/install/ instead (a PC over USB is the easiest way). The tested files (details):

   • disc: Grand Theft Auto IV (USA) (En,Fr,De,Es,It).iso, MD5 f0a046aed1520a913b2125f0a69ee7d0
   • TU8: TU_1A581VI_000000K000000.0000000000205, MD5 f041b5f6721d7ee578560bac21668826

   The file names do not matter, as long as the disc image ends in .iso.

3. Press Install, wait for it to finish, then press Play.

The full walkthrough, including the install/ folder and older versions, is in INSTALL.md.

Documentation

Document	Contents
Installation and first launch	Installing the APK, copying the game files, the first-run installer, upgrading
Advanced configuration	args.txt settings, live tuning, driver selection, logs, performance presets
What was done for Android	Technical write-up of the port: build, platform layer, driver, renderer and stability work
Building from source	Building the APK yourself
Upstream README	The original Liberty Recompiled README (desktop builds, mods, online)

Credits

• Liberty Recompiled by OZORDI and contributors, and the ReXGlue SDK it is built on. Almost all of the hard work of recompiling GTA IV is theirs. This fork adds the Android platform layer and the Android performance work.
• Mesa Turnip, the open-source Adreno Vulkan driver. The bundled build is StevenMXZ's Turnip 26.3.0-R6.
• libadrenotools by bylaws, which loads a custom driver into an app.
• The Vulkan driver proxy comes from skate3-android and skate3-pocket.
• SDL3 for the Android activity, input and audio.
• nfsmw-nx by StevensND, a ReXGlue port of Need for Speed: Most Wanted to the Nintendo Switch and a great reference for running a ReXGlue recompilation on weak hardware. Our direct-calls tool (gta4-recomp/tools/direct_calls.py) is adapted from their llamadas_directas.py. Their work on game busy-waits and thread placement led to this port's frame-wait hook and thread pinning experiments.

Grand Theft Auto IV is a trademark of Take-Two Interactive Software. This project is not affiliated with or endorsed by Rockstar Games or Take-Two Interactive.